WEBER AND MARX: PROTESTANTISM AND CAPITALISM

Abstract

It is usual, in France as well as in the United States, to oppose Marx and Weber as two incompatible and contradictory paradigms in the social sciences. Inspite of their differences, both share a vision of modern capitalism as a system where impersonal and "reified" relations replace personal relations of dependence and in which capital accumulation becomes largely an irrational end in itself. Their interpretations of the origins of capitalism are, none the less, quite different. While Marx insists on the importance of violence in the primitive accumulation of capital - without ignoring the association between protestantism and capitalism - Weber emphasizes the decisive role of the elective affinity between the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In only two passages of his Protestant Ethics, dealing with the genesis of capitalism in North America, there is a polemic against historical materialism.